It was a test. It had to be. Otherwise, I was dead and this was hell.
My ears refused to hear the sound of the alarm.
A test.
The numbers on the alarm clock weren’t changing. Even when I squinted at them and begged them to give up their reality. Even when I moaned and whimpered.
Only a test.
The numbers stared at me with the red finality of a heart wound.
I could beat a test.
Couldn’t I?
It dawned on me that the numbers were correct. The sound meant it was time to get up. With jaw agape, I beheld the alarm clock in murderous amusement. I wanted to stab myself in the neck, shit my pants, and tear all my hair out.
Twelve hours of my life had gone missing.
I had come in from the oil rig after what had amounted to a double shift, showered, eaten, and laid down. I had been trying to go to sleep. That was three seconds ago as far as I could remember.
All that time… like it had never been.
Outside, I could hear thunder and the beginning of a rain shower. I turned over in my bed to pry apart two slats of the blinds, and peered out into the blackest hell of a storm I had seen since coming to New Mexico. I had the feeling again. The feeling that was like all my feelings happening right on top of one another.
Without even thinking about it, I reached down and tore my alarm clock out of the socket hard enough to twist its prongs and threw it across the room. It died with a final failing beep.
Oh God… there’s something wrong inside my head, I think. Something wrong like it has never been wrong before. I want to cry, laugh, revel in divine wonder, and curse a loveless world.
“I’m insane right now, aren’t I?” I asked no one.
In response, I laughed hysterically. The kind of laughter where the white around my eyes was too big, my mouth was open too wide, and the tendons in my neck were too tight. I was so tired I wanted to die, and I hadn’t even had the reprieve of sleep to separate the days of this awful job. This was too imaginative for hell.
This was like some ancient Tartarus.
I was on night tour. I was going to be on the rig from eleven at night to seven in the morning, and since we’d moved the rig and set it back up yesterday that meant we’d be doing nothing but tripping pipe all day. No breaks, no lunch, throwing my tongs at the pipe, twisting, and making new connections.
A brief lightning strike illuminated the room. With only the barest presence of my upper brain functions to process the data, my eyes took in the sight. I felt like things were there that I couldn’t see. As if another dimension had been revealed to me, and my mind was only beginning to understand its contents.
I made a list of occurrences where people were known to lose time. I came up with only two. As I had not suffered any traumatic brain injuries, that left alien abductions.
The lightning struck again, and I could see a vague humanoid shape down at one end of the room. The fact that some part of me knew this was a coat over a lamp did not really seem to matter.
“This isn’t happening,” some other person said with my voice while some other person operated my hands and rubbed them all over my eyes and face.
But the longer I stared, and the more the emotional simultaneity overtook me, the more it made sense.
I had been chosen, out of all people in the human race, as a sort of test for mankind. An alien being had erased twelve hours of my life in order to see how I would react. If I behaved myself, and proved us civilized, they would reveal their presence, acknowledge mankind as their equals, and welcome us into the Galactic Senate. If I pulled my eyes out and started talking about how I found the redheaded nun from Sister Act really cute, they would go back into their spaceship and leave us be for another thousand years.
“This isn’t real,” said the person living in my disconnected and still-sleeping frontal lobes.
It was so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. In fact, if I acted nonchalant and pretended I knew nothing about the test, I might be able to see the alien if I turned my head fast enough. That’d teach him for using primitive telepathic mind cloaks. He’d be wearing some sort of black or brown Jedi robe of course. Aliens didn’t study humans unless they were compelled by their Space God to do so.
For no reason other than that I felt crying would have reflected negatively on my species, I started to laugh as I stumbled around the house, picking up my boots, hard hat, and coveralls. Thankful that the kids were asleep I got outside just as it began to rain. I was positively howling when my driller came by the house and I crawled into the bed of the truck.
“You okay Shrek?” he asked.
We were becoming friends at last… not that that meant I could ride in the front of the truck. I was still white, after all. I wondered if the alien understood racism.
“I am fine.” I replied. I considered saying that I was great but my guess was that the aliens valued neutrality of emotion. I sat with my back pressed against the cabin. The alien took a seat on the tire and watched me.
I sat with my back against the bed of the truck, trying to focus the mental fireflies that kept popping in and out of existence into a coherent picture of the alien. I imagined the alien would be impressed if I could overpower its mind control technology through sheer force of will. I wondered if I stared hard enough at the back of the truck, if I couldn’t cause his little sensor pad to overload and turn into a shower of sparks, disable his cloak, and catch him in the act of observation.
The Navajo turned on their reservation rap music. I wondered what would happen if Fox News ever got a copy of that CD. It made gangster rap look downright friendly.
I closed my eyes for a second that lasted thirty minutes. Why did it feel like there was something wrong with my brain? Why did I want to close my eyes and take deep breaths? Why did it feel like I was asleep even though I was wide awake? And why was it so difficult to tell the difference between myself and inanimate objects?
That’s when I realized the alien was trying to put me back to sleep. I smiled at the back of the truck and mouthed “Nice try, Sherlock.” I figured it was best not to point out that this didn’t make any sense. The aliens probably didn’t have a very good understanding of our vernacular anyway, so who cared if I couldn’t use sentences?
“We’ve got another two hours of this, amigo. Then the work starts.” I whispered. Whether to myself or the alien, I was not sure.
No doubt disturbed, the alien invisibly signaled to his command ship that the subject seemed to be resisting his Sleep Ray. To which the alien ship no doubt replied that said ray was on maximum, but the subject’s will was simply too strong.
I stared off into the night sky for a while, and wondered what constellation the alien called home. I didn’t know too many of the constellations. The only ones I could name consistently were Orion, The Big Dipper, and Cassiopeia.
I tried to fill my head with pleasant thoughts as we drove through the dirt roads of the desert. Thoughts of the children playing. Thoughts of school. Thoughts of friends I had discarded because friendship was too hard for me to maintain. Except in my mind I was not me but someone else, a better human who did not push away what he loved. Suddenly angry, I stared at the tire at the back of the truck.
The alien sat invisibly on the tire, frowning at me.
Don’t you feel sorry for me, you stupid alien, I projected telepathically.
After that I tried not to think at all. For one of the few times in my life, this presented itself with no difficulty.
When we were at the rig, I wasted no time in jumping out of the bed of the truck and running up to the dog house. I felt sure of my movements in a way I rarely had. As if every action taken was reflexive and ingrained. I was on the deck before I knew what had happened. I saw the alien still by the truck, disguised as bunch of coolers that the Tool Pusher had left outside his trailer.
That’s right you alien fuck, you want to watch me, you’re going to have to stand out in the rain.
I think it might have turned its head at me, to acknowledge the receipt of this telepathic projection, but it may also have been the wind knocking a beer can off the top cooler.
We tripped pipe. We tripped pipe without pausing for the crews to change place. We simply took over the position of the man before us without missing a beat. I threw my tongs. We twisted the pipe. Mud splashed everywhere. All over the deck. All over my clothes. All over my face.
The rain fell harder as the night got blacker.
I was glad of the rain, although the Navajo didn’t like it. The Navajo hated the rain, the same way I hated the heat and the desert. I was born in Aberdeen, and the rain, the clouds, and the lightning were my friends. We were on my native land at last, and the tongs no longer seemed so heavy when I threw them. I was a creature of the wet and the cold, and I moved in it as well as the Navajo had moved in the dry and the heat.
The rain washed the mud from my face. The alien had not moved an inch. If I quit, we would never be considered worthy of a place in the Galactic Senate.
“Put out, Shrek!”
“Fuck your mother!”
“Hurry up, Shrek!”
“Suck my cock!”
“Faster Shrek, faster!”
“Suck piss!”
I felt invigorated by the lightning. The upper lobes knew it was dangerous to be on a metal platform raised up high during a thunderstorm, and I was glad that I couldn’t hear them because being senseless to the danger was glorious. I smirked when the alien fell into a crouch, succumbing to my mental fury. The Tool Pusher came outside his trailer just long enough to pick the coolers back up and tie them together with a rope.
I lost another hour.
When I came back to myself there was a piece of venison steak in my mouth. I was eating it without the aid of my hands, and it was covered with carcinogenic drilling mud that I swallow like gravy and fried onions. The world was loud with rain, thunder, and the crash of steel. I start singing a song that consisted of me shouting swear words over and over again more or less at random.
The alien trembled in the wind, but he was too tightly bound to seek shelter.
My driller said something in Navajo punctuated by a bunch of fucks. I think it meant he likes the new me. The me that doesn’t care that its arms are burning or that its lungs want to quit. The me that will drill a hole in the Earth because why the fuck not? The wind howls in my ears. It makes me think of Aberdeen, and the smell of pine needles. It makes me think of the damp and the Harbor and the moon. The dirt that’s black like honey-tar and the trees that shoot up tall and wider than a man.
One of the Navajo declares that he is cold and it’s too wet to work. I spit at him the same way he spit at me when I fell down from heat stroke. “Get back to work you fucking pussy!”
My driller laughs. “Ooh boy, Shrek’s gonna drill himself a hole!”
I worked to let the alien know that humanity is dangerous. The fury of the rains was our fury. The power of the lightning was our power. And the chaos of the storm was a reflection of our own madness. If he thought he somehow had the authority to test us, then he was sadly mistaken. We were the masters of the universe and all its elements. I should have known this before. If anything the alien should kneel to us and beg forgiveness for the temerity of testing us.
When I finished one venison steak it replaced itself with another. And then another. We worked for eight hours, and the sky was a predawn black when the next crew arrived. The stars had cycled over us, and I was not the boy I had been three months ago who could barely trip pipe for an hour without throwing up. I would never be that boy again.
Little Mike crawled up into the derricks. Big John took the Motor Man’s tongs. The next worm took my tongs and the cycle was complete. We were still drilling hellward. We had been doing it since time began, almost. My memory was destroyed. We had been drilling since before time began.
I wiped my face clean in the dog house, knowing I had beat the alien. As the sun rose, the ship would reveal itself, all glittering silver against the horizon. It would hover a few feet over the ground, a door would open and a bright white light would spill out followed shortly by a gangplank. Three aliens would emerge, the one in the center would be their leader and I would kneel to him… and….
I was in the bed of the truck, driving home, still in the cold black. There was half an inch of water soak my pants, and when the capillary action brought it up to my balls I hissed. I looked down to my stomach. I used to weigh more. What had happened? How long would my belly remain if I stayed and forgot school? Another three months and I would be chiseled from wood. I scratched my stomach. I saw I’d torn off half of my middle fingernail somewhere in the middle of the night. I couldn’t muster the mental energy to give a shit.
I wanted to say something, even if I was the only person who would hear it, but all I could manage were some monosyllabic gibberish sounds. My mind was destroyed and language was beyond its power. The alien watched me, sitting invisibly on the tire. He watched as I slunk down into the still-waters of the truck bed. He hovered at the bottom of my vision when I stared up at the stars and dreamed of flying through space. I could hear the wind whistling as the air was displaced by the truck, but it never touched the hood of his robe. Or his sleeve when he reached out to me with one of his hands.
As the sun broke, he touched me, and I slept until I could remember how to dream.
